Category Archives: FM13

First of all, another apology. I know it has been a long time since my last update and I hope that no-one has been waiting expectantly. I am currently in the process of moving house which, added to the usual work and family commitments, is consuming an awful lot of my time and effort.

Added to that, I have been writing for a couple of other projects. The first, also FM-related, could be worth your attention – the ‘Clear Cut Chance‘ styles itself as an FM Magazine for thinkers. So if you fit into that bracket, please sign up for email alerts or follow on Twitter.

Secondly, I started writing about real-life football matters at an excellent site called Think Football. The site is well worth a look and, so long as you avoid those attributed to ‘Shrew Naldo’, you should find some interesting reading.

So please do not expect any regular activity on this blog for the coming months. Instead, I’m afraid there will only be intermittent blogs as and when I find the time and wifi access. I’m afraid that the blog might be a little ‘on hiatus’ for the next 2-3 months but it certainly will not be dying off completely. I enjoy the writing too much. Unfortunately, it’s just one of those times when circumstances dicate!

In the meantime, here’s a brief rundown of my time in Brazil and a few other matters.

Something which I often see asked around the FM sites and forums is how do people analyse their tactics? How do you spot the strengths and weaknesses of your own system? How to you see what is wrong and how do you fix it? What changes do you make during games and why?

It’s probably the most basic set of questions pertinent to the most fundamental area of the game and, understandably, I think that it’s something which many people struggle with.

I think that the reason it is so difficult for people to grasp is not only that it is a difficult skill; but that everyone has their own methods – none of which are right or wrong. Couple that with a perceived stigma that you might not “know what you’re talking about” and the massively arrogant and ignorant approach of many posters on FM or football websites, and you can understand why people have difficulty in identifying where they are going wrong.

This post, therefore, is going to try and put across a few of the methods that I use in trying to spot issues with my tactics. I’m not the best FM player in the world but I think I do pretty well so whilst I’m not suggesting that I have all the answers or that my way of doing things is “the best”, I hope that anyone who is struggling with their tactics in FM can take a little something from this post… and maybe the rest of you can just laugh at my efforts!!

So, as an example – here’s my effort at a strikerless libero tactic and a friendly against Anderlecht as the case study.

So I’ve been requested to write a bit on my approach to scouting. As I don’t feel that scouting itself is terribly exciting, I’ve morphed this request a little into covering more on the process of the entire transfer.

I guess that there’s an opinion amongst some of my readers that I am more thorough than some FM-ers in my transfer policy. I say “thorough” but that’s really a polite way of saying it. Pernickity, overly analytical, obsessive or borderline anal might be more accurate descriptions of my transfer policy.

I really enjoy the transfer dealings within FM and I tend to spend an awful lot of time considering my moves, at least whilst I’m managing small clubs (which is 99% of the time).

For me then, there’s a very logical process which culminates in a player signing on the dotted line…

Please note that this is not my work, it has been kindly contributed to FM Veteran by Eds from Supports Interactive – available on Twitter here and worth a follow. The original post can be found here.

So massive thanks to Eds – hopefully not the last guest post on FM Veteran – particularly if they are as good as this one.

Creating and exploiting space is the key to any successful football tactic. Be it via keeping the ball and stretching the opposition until holes appear, or immediately counter-attacking into the open space, every single successful tactic exploits space in different ways. Over the past few months, I’ve been focusing on something I’d previously never even thought about – the Inverse Wing Back.

The full-back is an often neglected position in football, particularly in a four-man defense. Because of this, I’ve always been interested in tactics that bring the full-backs into play more effectively. So when this thread popped up, I accepted the challenge.

I made a post a short time ago advocating the use of “the pocket” in FM, exploiting the space between defence and midfield to bring you scoring chances and causing the opposition defence as much problem as possible. In these articles (there will be several parts), I’ll look at the exact opposite – how to defend this zone and prevent the opposition from doing the same to you.

In an effort to do so, I’ll look at a few different ideas that you can employ within your own tactics. Rather than do this in the course of my own game and potentially cause myself some problems, I’ve started a new game and taken over both Lazio and Udinese – two Italian sides of similar ability. I’ll be replaying a friendly between the two on several occasions and employing various formations in an effort to illustrate my recommendations. I’ll be using, where possible, default formations within the game and asking my assistant to pick the team, take teamtalks, etc so that I am only showing the changes that particular recommended tweaks can make.

Typical example of a player “in the pocket”

In direct contrast to the first post, the situation above is exactly what we’ll be trying to avoid and I hope the following will help you to decide which method of doing so will be most profitable for your own team.

Following on from my earlier first impressions post, I’ve now had the opportunity to play the game a little more and become more familiar with some of the less ‘in-your-face’ features or changes from FM2012.

The good news is that I’ve found quite a few of those little touches that have improved the game and, even more importantly, the beta patch which has been released seems to have improved many of the early bugs that were found. With two more patches scheduled within days of retail release then there is real promise that the match engine will be really quite good.

Don’t worry, I’m still a grumpy old git and I still have complaints but I don’t want to portray an entirely negative opinion so let’s start with the good stuff…

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First of all, a disclaimer – yes I know this is beta and a lot of people will look at my criticisms and say “calm down, they’ll fix that for the main game”. However, I still think my criticisms are valid for a number of reasons:

there are problems where the game seems to have regressed significantly from FM12. I really don’t know how this happens, surely even FM13 beta should be building on the foundations of previous games

some of the problems are so obvious that I’m dumbstruck that they haven’t been seen in pre-beta testing. For me, this means one of two things: a. no pre-beta testing was done or b. it was done and there were other issues which have been “corrected” but had a knock-on effect to create the current issues. Which brings me on to my third point…

if the latter is true then two weeks is a very short time to not only fix the current issues but also to test the subsequent beta / release code and ensure that there aren’t any unwanted side effects. How effectively will the problems be rectified? SI have a fairly good record in correcting in-game bugs but at lot of players have argued that each release isn’t “stable” until the 3rd post-winter-window patch

lastly, some of my first impressions are with things which clearly aren’t bugs but are items which have been deliberately input by SI, be that new features or amendments to existing ones.

Anyway, for those reasons, I think that a “very early impressions” post is valid although I will obviously be reserving full judgement until full release. Here’s what I think so far…

I watch every minute of every Austrian Bundesliga game. This blog contains posts from the top players of the week, to top youngsters to watch. Follow me on twitter for more: @FRfussballtim. For all enquiries email: tim.jones@footballradar.com. All views expressed on this blog are my own.